I hereby do announce that BrickFest 2005 Castle Room will be hosting the EVIL ENGINES catapult competition!
All elligible catapults will of course work (they will launch a lego projectile of your choice). Catapults will be evaulated based on range, reliability, accuracy, realism, aesthetics, the weight and size of the payload they can launch, and overall "cleverness". I'd like to focus on minifig scaled catapults - this does allow you to built pretty large, as real life catapults were sometimes huge, (but I'm not primarily looking for 3 foot high technic beamed monsters.) I'm willing to be pretty flexible overall.
The catapults can be powered in a variety of ways:
-by your hand (like pretty much all the the catapults that LEGO released as sets)
-by rubber bands
-by gravity/weight (trebuchet style)
-or anything else reasonable you can think of - short of an actual motor
Having said that, I'm sure you can figure out which methods will be most impressive to the judges and the public. If you want to just pull back a rubber band powered arm and let it go that's fine (but wouldn't it be cool if you could figure out some kind of wind back and trigger mechanism?)
There will be an award for "Best Catapult Engineer" "Master Siege Engineer" - or something like that for whoever builds the overall most impressive EVIL ENGINE!
If you have any questions, post online or get in touch with me personally.
